Photos of Black Harvard Law Professors Defaced
Outside a room in Wasserstein Hall on the campus of Harvard hang framed photographs of every tenured law professor in the school’s 198-year history. When students and faculty walked by those photos this morning, they that tape had been placed on each photo of a black professor, obscuring their faces.
There are clear and striking images of the incident in an article on Blavity, written and photographed by Michele Hall, a second-year student at the law school. She writes:
The portraits of black professors, the ones that bring me and so many other black students feelings of pride and promise, were defaced. Their faces were covered with a single piece of black tape, crossing them out of Harvard Law School’s legacy of legal scholarship. Their faces were slashed through, X-ing them out, marking them as maybe unwanted or maybe unworthy or maybe simply too antithetical to the legacy of white supremacy on which Harvard Law School has been built.
Photos the vandalism were also shared on Twitter by another Harvard law student named Jonathan Wall (click to enlarge), who thinks the tape is a response to recent demonstrations at Harvard supporting student activists across the country:
In response to yesterday's protests, cowards have covered the faces of Harvard Law's Black professors w/ black tape. pic.twitter.com/IuNd9ckucj
— the other one (@imfromraleigh) November 19, 2015
According to the Boston Globe, university police are investigating the incident.
